The Moral Economy of Sitting in the History of Astronomy The Astronomers’ Chair: The Moral Economy of Sitting in the History of Astronomy
Project by Prof. Dr Omar W. Nasim
This project presents the first cultural history of the chair’s role in the history of science. It does so by focusing on the astronomer’s observing chair: a task-specific mechanical chair designed—particularly between 1820 and 1880—for telescopic observations. In order to explain the observing chair’s widespread appeal and prevalence in nineteenth-century depictions of astronomy, I examine the relevant visual culture that shaped European audiences’ interpretations of images of chairs more generally. Drawing on the work of furniture and design historians, who have analysed the normative role of the ordinary chair and postures within the bourgeois home, this project provides an interpretative framework for the social and cultural significance of representations of observing chairs in Germany, France, but particularly in Great Britain and the United States. By addressing a variety of themes and subjects related to nineteenth-century visual cultures, the project offers a fresh perspective on race and gender, furniture and science, posture and knowledge, historicity and modernity, labour and professionalisation, the self and how the ‘Other’ found its way into how astronomers sat, where they sat, and how seating furniture was designed for them. The work engages directly with racial, gender, colonial and nineteenth-century studies, as well as issues surrounding the epistemological, visual and moral significance of seated postures in the history of science, technology and design. This interdisciplinary project uncovers and traces a number of key themes that shaped the significance of the astronomers’ observing chair as a cultural symbol of modernity.
Publications:
The Astronomer’s Chair: A Visual and Cultural History (MIT Press, forthcoming)
Presentations:
“The Astronomers’ Chair”, at the Copenhagen Planetarium, 3 October 2019
Keynote Address at the 14th Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop at the University of Notre Dame, 19–23 June 2019
“The Astronomer’s Chair: The Moral Economy of Sitting,” Colloquium on the History of Knowledge, Humboldt University Berlin, 25 April 2018
“The Astronomer’s Chair: The Moral Economy of Sitting in Science, 1750–1900,” Workshop: vom Schreibtisch, LMU (Munich), 14 December 2017
